Want to be an astronaut? Not if you have 'the wrong stuff'

A psychologist and member of NASA’s astronaut selection panel explained recently how they vet candidates not only for physical fitness, but for mental fitness as well.

In space, no one care hear you scream.

But that doesn’t mean we want astronauts doing that.

“We’re looking for the ‘right stuff,’ but we’re also trying to get rid of people with the ‘wrong stuff,’” Kelley Stack, a contractor with NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houson, told space.com. Slack is a member of the selection panel.

Good candidates are those who can work well in isolated, high-risk environments, and are resilient, easy-going and work well with others.

Bad candidates? Those with psychiatric disorders and marital problems, among others.

Space.com reports that more than 6,000 people applied to be astronauts in 2013. Only eight were chosen.

Even then, it can take up to two years for a final selection, and a decade before that first spaceflight.